Helmut Schmidt

Helmut Schmidt (23 December 1918-10 November 2015) was Chancellor of West Germany from 16 May 1974 to 1 October 1982, succeeding Willy Brandt and peceding Helmut Kohl. He was a member of the SPD.

Biography
Helmut Schmidt was born in Hamburg, Weimar Republic in 1918, and he was a Luftwaffe conscript and then an officer during World War II. He joined the SPD in 1946, and as a student of politics from 1946 to 1949, he became the president of the socialist German student league from 1946 to 1947. He was an MP from 1953 to 1962 and in 1965-87, but he achieved national prominence as interior senator of the city-state of Hamburg in 1962, when he coped successfully with a catastrophic flood in teh city. He became Defense Secretary in 1969, and Finance Secretary in 1972. As Chancellor he had to cope with the effects of two oil-price shocks, which he did with relative success. Moreover, he was faced with the terrorist challenge of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. On the international scene he backed the controversial deployment of Pershing nuclear missiles in Europe in response to the arrival of Soviet SS20 missiles in East Germany, a stance which ultimately lost him the support of his own party. Always to right of the SPD, his squabblings with his own party led to the defection of his coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party, whose support of a no-confidence motion by the CDU led to the election of Helmut Kohl as Chancellor in 1982. Schmidt died in 2015.